[Sugar-devel] [IAEP] Children want Sugar 0.84, for the wrong reason

[Chris Marshall]

On 3/14/2010 9:49 AM, Chris Marshall wrote:
> On 3/14/2010 1:17 AM, Bernie Innocenti wrote:
>> On Sat, 2010-03-13 at 20:50 +0000, Gary C Martin wrote:
>>
>>> It feels uncomfortable that Sugar 0.84 is already a year old effort
>>> as of this week, from its official release, too far ahead of
>>> deployments?
>>
>> It seems we should try to shorten our "time to market". Both Fedora and
>> SoaS have been trailing Sugar releases quite well. Instead, OLPC appears
>> to have frozen on Fedora 11 much too early.
>
>  From my G1G1 "deployment" point of view, the XO-1
> seems stuck on Fedora 9 and os767 / os802. I've
> been making do with the OS on an SD card and turning
> off suspend/resume to avoid killing the SD card.
>
> The last I heard was that the suspend-resume SD card
> killer bug may (or was it should or supposed to) be
> fixed. I haven't gotten up the nerve to lose my whole
> working environment just to see if it is fixed.
>
> Another problem I've had with the XO-1 and the Fedora
> 9 release was that there was some packaging problem for
> a dependency of LaTeX and many other document editing
> type software that prevented installing LaTeX on the
> XO-1. The bug was a known packaging problem but there
> never was a new package released to correct the
> dependency problems.
>
>
>> One would think that a relatively fixed platform like the XO-1 could lag
>> behind on hardware support without consequences, but users have the bad
>> habit of demanding that a 3G modem purchased last week would work on a
>> version of Fedora released one year ago. So you end up back-porting
>> large pieces of Fedora 12--breaking who knows what else--while the udev
>> maintainer asks you to keep him informed on your progress. So much for
>> the good intentions of stability.
>
> I would be happy if the existing XO-1 hardware worked well
> enough to upgrade the base release for my family's XO-1's,
> including
>
> (1) sound
> (2) video
> (3) suspend/resume
> (4) compatable Fedora release
> (5) no SD card suspend/resume bug
> (6) activity sharing
> (7) current Sugar
>
> My thought was to come up the learning curve and to start
> developing for the XO and Sugar learning platform. As is,
> my current Sugar hardware platform at 0.82 and os767 or
> os802 (with its glitches) prevents me from working on the
> XO-1 without giving up all the above features which are
> what I would like to program to.
>
> Another side effect is that even lurking on the mailing
> lists is less helpful since I am unable to follow any of
> the current discussions as related to the software on the
> XO-1 and Sugar 0.82.
>
>> Not ideal, but still better than the current situation in which we start
>> a school year with a version of Sugar released over one year ago.
>
> I continue to watch the efforts to get F11 on the XO-1
> working up to the level of os767/os802 and so more
> general release and usability. In the meantime, I plan
> to take another look at the above issues, the current
> status of the XO-1 support, and what I could do to move
> things along for the G1G1 non-deployment.
>
> Regards,
> Chris
>